PlayBook

RIM may be faced with a another writedown as its unsold BlackBerry smartphones and PlayBook tablet inventory continue to rise. RIM's unsold devices have risen by two-thirds in the past year, making for a possible writedown of as much as $1 billion when its financial quarter ends this Saturday.

Cisco's attempt at entering the massively competitive tablet market has come to a quiet end. The company's Cius product has been set off to greener pastures without even making a serious dent in the industry. It was meant to be the leader in enterprise-focused tablets. But as you may already know, the iPad has kind of taken that title, and it took it before the Cius even had a chance to shine. It's the same reason the Blackberry Playbook never got a chance to spread its wings.

Today was a big day for RIM. At BlackBerry World, they needed to impress customers, developers, and the tech press with BlackBerry 10, and while it doesn’t seem like a slam dunk, what has been seen so far seems to have been met with a positive reception. It’s been a busy day, but so far we’ve seen a BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha device, basic functionality of the OS, and a demo of various apps coming to the platform.

If Angry Birds Space doesn’t satisfy your BlackBerry PlayBook gaming needs, how about original PlayStation games? An enterprising developer on the Crackberry forums has created a PlayStation emulator for the PlayBook, allowing you to play a myriad of 1994 games on the 7-inch tablet. It’s still a work in progress, so some games may fail to load, but hey: it’s PlayStation on your tablet.

RIM has released an update today for its BlackBerry PlayBook OS, bringing the platform up to version 2.01.358. Although it's not nearly as big of an update as when the company released version 2.0, which finally brought the long promised native email, calendar, and contacts apps as well as Android app support, this new update does bring some welcome performance improvements and bug fixes.

After a huge media kerfuffle over Research in Motion's proposed ban on Android app sideloading, the man who stirred the controversy in the first place is claiming that his previous comments were blown out of proportion. The company's vice president of developer relations Alec Saunders blamed the misunderstanding on Twitter, and its limited character allowances. Okay.

RIM is planning to disable support for sideloaded apps on its BlackBerry PlayBook with a forthcoming update. The company's vice president of Developer Relations, Alec Saunders, made the announcement via Twitter, saying that the move was to avoid the rampant piracy of apps, or in his words, the "chaotic cesspool of the Android Market."

If you thought Research in Motion's bungled Playbook tablet was on the way out, think again. It looks like RIM is not giving up on its iPad challenger, even though that game is an uphill battle for the strongest companies with the biggest momentum, much less ones that have lost double-digit market shares over the last year or so. Nevertheless, there might be a refresh in the Playbook world and its name is 4G.

Determined to actually drive some good publicity for itself, Research in Motion has announced that more than a million Playbook tablets have made their way to end users, a little over a year after it was first introduced to the market. Of course, at this point RIM is losing money on every Playbook it sells, and probably isn't making that money back on apps and content, so the good news only goes so far.

RIM may be giving up to 2,000 developers a BlackBerry 10 device at the BlackBerry Jam event in early May, but the company is keen to point out that we shouldn't extrapolate too much from either hardware or software about the next-gen smartphones. In fact, the OS running on the device - dubbed the BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha - won't even be true BlackBerry 10, instead "a prototype running a modified version of the PlayBook OS which will help developers design their apps for the BlackBerry 10 smartphone form factor."